This case study was a part of a course on User-Centered Research and Evaluation offered by Carnegie Mellon’s Human Computer Interaction Master’s Program This course included a semester-long project aiming to conduct user research surrounding the topic of online travel planning. Over the course of the semester, we applied mixed methods to gain insights on the way families use online travel resources to plan their trips, and what shortcomings and pain points they experience.
ROLE
UX RESEARCH
TIMELINE
SEP - DEC 2022
CONTEXT
This project was semester-long course at Carnegie Mellon University.
TOOLS
Figma, Miro, Zoom
TEAM
5 UX Researchers
Families with young children are burdened with a lot of added stressors and needs that other travelers do not have to consider when planning their trips.
Help families make easier travel decisions based on user-generated data from other families.
Having kids is tough enough as it is, but having to make on the go adjustments due to spontaneous tantrums, mishaps, and emergencies can make or break family vacations in an instant. We've all been on a family vacations where plans were changed or completely dropped due to some drama or other.
Myself and a team of four other graduate design students from Carnegie Mellon University challenged ourselves to dive into this problem space with the intention of easing the burden of travel planning for families with young kids.
The result of this work was FamTrips.
FamTrips is a mobile app designed to help families plan their travel according to their needs
How might we ease the process of online travel planning for families with children?
Our team chose families as our core user groups for this project because we recognized that travel looks very different for travelers with children. We wanted to challenge our design around meeting unmet needs that current tools do not offer.
Understanding how families travel
Children bring a lot of dynamism into traveling and the planning process, and immersing ourselves in the domain brings numerous insights, limitations, and opportunities.
Validating with quantitative data
We conducted a pulse survey with 16 participants to validate our findings from our interview sessions.
Interviewing procedure
We conducted research sessions with 5 parents of children below the age of 12 years who have traveled within the last year. Our goal was to observe and identify behavioral patterns arising from common situations across participants and naturally elicit data about user needs and goals.
We asked users, if they felt comfortable, to bring along pictures from their last family vacation and talk about their experience to help us understand users’ travel preferences, requirements, and challenges.
We created a travel planning timeline with each participant to find common patterns and actions within the travel planning process for families.
We followed up these activities with interview questions about common strategies and tools that users might use to plan their trips with their families.
Identifying challenges and pain points before, during, and after a trip.
We created user journeys to represent our participants' experience with traveling with their children and identified the challenges that they face throughout their entire journey.
Affinity mapping to model behavior
We modeled our findings from our guided activities, interviews, and survey responses to identify insights and opportunities unique to families with children.
Key insights based on research findings
Rapid ideation and concept testing
We used a rapid idea generation technique called "Crazy 8s" to come up with eight ideas each under eight minutes. From these, we were able to analyze our ideas and identify core user needs, rank them, and create storyboards to test concepts with users.
The team voted on which user needs to prioritize in our solution
Finding a destination
Allow parents to ease the trouble of searching for a suitable destination to bring their children to.
Sourcing trustworthy reviews
Verify the authenticity of reviewers by virtue of being on a platform exclusively for families
Writing travel reviews
Contributing travel reviews on the platform should be a simple process -- families that want to write reviews but forget can be gently reminded.
Planning & editing an itinerary
Pre-planned itineraries with flexibility and suggested kid-friendly alternatives both while planning and during the trip.
Comparing options
View and compare multiple trip itineraries, destinations, stays, attractions, and travel for easy decision-making process.
Our design had to meet the following goals
Usability testing
After 5 usability tests of these screens, we streamlined the onboarding process, added the ability to share plans across family members in the app, and review trips from a home screen dashboard.
Final prototype
The final version of the app includes an onboarding workflow, customizable dashboard with updated reviews of key locations and information regarding ongoing and upcoming trips.
Finding kid-friendly travel inspiration
Browse community-approved kid-friendly travel destinations selected based on user preference
Intelligent itinerary generation
Choose from an assortment of family-friendly travel activities, restaurants, attractions, and accommodations.
Travel reviews by parents and for parents
Read and share reviews with a community of family-friendly travelers at the push of a button.
Sometimes it's okay to not give users a 'magic solution'
Travel planning for families is tough, especially with little ones. Listening to all the stories, frustrations, and concerns that parents voiced during these sessions made me think about all the trips that my family would take together visiting our relatives in Romania when I was younger. It gave me an entirely new perspective on the numerous struggles that parents face, even outside of travel planning.
It was tempting during the design stage of this project to think about solutions that appealed to giving parents a break from their kids. After all, the cause of most families' stress when it comes down to it is worrying about their kids. In fact, many parents we talked to wanted a 'magic solution' that would allow them to take their minds off their kids and just sit back and relax. Of course, with any UX project, sometimes the solution isn't always what users want. Sometimes it's about taking a step back, and trying to find the right use cases to solve that can create an improved experience in other ways.
Like Henry Ford said (allegedly), "if I asked people what they wanted, they would have said 'faster horses'"
